Archive for June, 2017

I recently disputed a large (almost $4K) credit card charge, for a 3D printer. I had gone back and forth with the manufacturer, and eventually returned it when it failed to work properly.

After I disputed the charge, the manufacturer was given an opportunity to respond to my dispute. They did so, with 35 pages containing all of the emails that we had traded back and forth. They also said that they agreed to refund my money.

The credit card company (Citi Bank’s AT&T Universal MasterCard) then reversed the credit that they had given me. They did this after their “investigators” had “investigated”. I guess their investigators cannot read English.

The credit card company claims that if a merchant responds to a disputed charge at all, that the credit card company is required, BY LAW, to reverse the credit.

This is beyond my belief. I can understanding a reversal of credit if there are facts in dispute, but in this case, the merchant agrees with me: give me the credit.

Perhaps the people at Citi Bank were lying to me. Or perhaps some legislators created this unwise and bizarre situation.

In any event, at this point I want the refund, the merchant has agreed to the refund, and Citi Bank is sitting in the middle, denying me the refund.

I took my Etymotic ear buds and Samsung S6 phone out with me while I cut brush. It was a warm day, and I was sweating quite a bit. When I got home, the audio volume started to increase and decrease erratically. Spontaneous clicks in various places caused applications to start spontaneously. The phone was almost impossible to use.

I moved the ear buds to another similar phone, but that phone also went crazy. Rebooting the phones did not help. But swapping to a different set of ear buds fixed the problem.

I’m only writing this up because I could find nothing about this problem when I did a Google search. I hope this helps someone else who finds themselves with “broken” phones and no idea what is going wrong.